SPEAKER_01: All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. We're here with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg and David Sacks. Our usual, usual foursome as we chop up the business news and what's going on. And just as a point of order, the frequency of the show is, well, don't ask me as we feel like it, as we feel like it. Correct. So do not ask me to advertise on the podcast because Chamath banned advertising. And do not ask me when the next one is. The next one is when Chamath decides he wants to go on a rant. But how are you holding up Bestie C.?
SPEAKER_03: Bestie C. is doing pretty well. Yeah. And the family, everything.
SPEAKER_01: Have you come out of quarantine in any way? As the first question I have for people is, has your behavior changed now as we go into, I think, what most people are calling phase two? Any change in what you're doing and the risk you're willing to take?
SPEAKER_03: Chamath. It's a really good question. You know, I've kind of ventured out a little bit, but I just kind of put on a mask. The only place I don't wear a mask is when I walk around my house, just because it's, you know, I live in the suburbs. And so there's just so much space between people that you don't really run into anybody. But if I have to go to Walgreens or CVS or whatever, I always bring a mask and gloves. So I've ventured out a little bit, but, you know, nothing meaningful, to be quite honest. And Sax, you're still out of the country in an undisclosed location.
SPEAKER_01: How are you feeling about what risks you're willing to take? You know, small groups of people. Are you going out to a restaurant? Are you seeing other people? How do you look at that? Are you seeing other people? How do you look at the risk you're willing to take personally?
SPEAKER_00: I've adjusted my risk profile, I think, quite a bit. So, I mean, the learning over the past few months was just that relatively that the fatality rate for, say, relatively healthy people under 50 without risk factors is, you know, 50 times lower than, say, you know, someone under over 60 or someone who has risk factors. I'm not being reckless, but I'm willing to kind of re-engage in social behavior among groups of friends. And on the theory that, you know, all of my friends have been locked down. I was in total lockdown for two months. So have my friends. And so, you know... I have several questions.
SPEAKER_03: The first is, I mean, how old are you? You look like 90, roughly. How old are you exactly? So how did the risk factors apply to you? Second, you have friends.
SPEAKER_01: Well, we know there's three on this call. Zaxi poo, I love you.
SPEAKER_00: I miss you. Yeah, no, I mean, you raise a good point. I mean, my physical age might be 90, but my lungs are only 48 years old. So my, my, hopefully my, my lungs are, you know, qualify in that under 50 category. So, you know, I've been playing golf with friends. You know, I've kind of widened the circle of people I'm willing to let into my quarantine, basically. So... By a dozen?
SPEAKER_01: By a hundred? How would you... By about...
SPEAKER_00: I've actually let in at not all at once, but at different times, probably about 20 people.
SPEAKER_01: Got it. So you feel comfortable and those people, you do ask them, have you quarantined? Have you been wearing masks? Have you been tested? Or you're just like, you kind of... I mean, I generally know that people have, I mean, now this may change over the next few months, but everyone's been kind of under shelter in place.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you were going to start to socializing with your friends, this would be the safest time to do it because everybody has been sort of locked down to some degree. And, you know, most places have been closed. And so, you know, if your friends haven't gotten it, they're probably pretty safe. All right.
SPEAKER_01: Swinging over to you, Dave Friedberg, tell me what you think of Sax's position. Obviously, Chamath's still in quarantine, venturing off to the store once in a while. Sax opening up to, you know, 20 people or whatever in small groups playing golf outdoors. But I'm assuming he's not having like an indoor party for 50, obviously. How would you look at the risk he's taking? And what risk are you taking, Friedberg, personally in your life?
SPEAKER_02: I'm not too dissimilar. I've got about eight buddies coming over to the pool this afternoon. We're going to do kind of like a Father's Day hang session, but we're going to be outside. And I've done a lot of hiking without masks and going outside without masks. I'm not really too concerned about outdoor behavior. There was a good analysis done that showed in tracing cases where they actually found the origin of where transmission occurred, 97% occurred indoors. So generally speaking, like outdoor activity to me is like pretty reasonable to do. So I'm pretty free with like doing stuff outside, meeting friends outside, hanging out by the pool. And I've had a bunch of people come by and hang out. And then indoor stuff I try and avoid. So if I'm going to go into a supermarket or grocery store, I'll wear a mask and I'll be in there as short a time period as I need to be. And I'm certainly not going into restaurants and stuff like that. But you would say outdoor. Is that a restaurant?
SPEAKER_01: I would assume if the tables were six feet apart, would you go to a restaurant and sit in a restaurant? Yeah, I'm not rushing to do that just yet.
SPEAKER_02: There's just something a little bit weird about the way some of those are configured. But generally, yes, like outdoor seems fine, you know, but like the way they set it up, it's almost like you're exposing yourself to a bunch of people around you because they're pretty confined spaces that they're setting up these tables at. And that, but yeah, sunlight and wind effectively will, you know, break apart the protein that is the virus and you will not have this kind of infectious viral particle. And so that's a pretty, you know, well understood thing at this point. And, you know, but it's not spoken about as much by public health officials because they don't want to kind of mitigate the concern and they don't want people to start taking off masks and, you know, taking on very risky behavior. But yeah, generally speaking, I think kind of like outdoor behavior is pretty, pretty safe and non non transmissible. The risky stuff I'm doing is, you know, we had a, you know, just having like folks come back to the house. And that's where I kind of still try and draw the line, which is having people in the house and you don't know where they've been. And so that's a little bit concerning. Inside the house, the spittle particles with COVID-19 in of them, if they did, would be lingering.
SPEAKER_01: That is what I'm sorry to be graphic, but that is the concern, correct, Freeburg? Is that when you're outdoors, the spittle would blow away and the particles are in the spit. Right. I mean, it really does evaporate. So the liquid that holds the protein, because the protein needs to be in a liquid to kind of maintain its integrity.
SPEAKER_02: When that evaporates, and it'll evaporate from wind or from sun, and that protein will degrade, it becomes kind of a non infectious particle at that point. And so when you're inside and you don't have those mechanisms, that particle can just float around in the air. And that's how it gets spread. And that's why in the tracing work that was done, it shows like 97% of cases happen in an indoor environment just like this. And I don't believe in the six foot thing. I think it's bullshit. Like if you're six foot away from someone in a room, people are coughing and that room gets filled with those particles over a one hour period. It doesn't matter if you're fucking six feet away or 20 feet away, that stuff's in the air. So this whole notion about like, hey, distance yourself in a restaurant in indoor space. It's like, no, that's actually not going to necessarily solve a problem. Maybe if someone immediately sneeze, you'll avoid it. But I mean, certainly Satch is advocacy for masks. Hey, Freeburgers, are you are you is that an aura ring you're wearing?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Have you tried it?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I actually just bought it a few weeks ago and I've been using it to monitor my sleep. But there was an article that said that, you know, I think that the all the NBA players are going to be given these aura rings as well, because it can apparently detect coronavirus three days ahead of other other other ways because it can see a change in your basal sort of body temperature. Yeah. So UCSF ran this data with them and they developed this algorithm that they think is pretty predictive.
SPEAKER_02: So we'll see if it works in production. But yeah, that's the theory. Well, there's also this connected thermometer that if you use it, I forgot the name of it, it sends all the data to a central repository and they've been able to predict it as well.
SPEAKER_01: And this just when we look at how the government. I think it's called recta temp.
SPEAKER_03: Recta temp. It has to go in your rectum.
SPEAKER_01: Just whatever's going on in your rectum, it goes right to the government. Now, and but this is an interesting thing when you think about low cost ways to deal with this. The amount of money we poured into the system, Chamath, is so great that if we just sent every single person in America an aura ring or one of these thermometers and said, just take your temperature all the day, we would know where the outbreaks were. And that would be a lot less expensive than a lot of the stimulus we're doing to try to cure what's going on. Do you agree that we should maybe include that in some sort of approach? Look, I think that I think the basic issue is that something really odd has happened in the United States.
SPEAKER_03: And we were talking about this in our group chat, which is that we have managed to find a way to politicize absolutely everything. And, you know, some things, for example, like universal basic income or, you know, what is our national policy towards China? Those are political issues. But things of public health, when they get sort of distorted and viewed through a political lens or just idiotic, you know, we view masks as a political statement. We would view these aura rings as, you know, people being afraid that the government was going to track them. So we'll find every good, we'll find a lot of excuses in order to blow up any good idea at this point, because we can politicize anything and we do it better than any other country in the world. You know, it's an interesting point you make there.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to go to you in a second, Sax. If you pull up my computer for a second, Nick. One thing I cannot understand when I watch the media or I watch this discussion and we haven't seen Dr. Fauci in about 60 days. I don't know where they buried him, but he's been put in a bunker somewhere. But the number of deaths in the United States continues to go down massively. Now, I know New York was a big outbreak and that contributes to it. But at the same time, if you look and you compare deaths to new cases, you know, the new cases has increased in some regions and testing has gone way up. So in trying to interpret this data, I don't understand why there's not somebody saying, listen, here's the good news. Debts are going way down. Testing is going way up. And here's what we should take from that. Sax, I think you and I might be slightly different sides of the aisle when it comes to politics. How do you look at this in terms of leadership at a federal level and then the media and how, you know, to Chumat's point, we politicize this? Yeah, well, I agree that that things get overly politicized and mass is a is a really good example.
SPEAKER_00: It's just a really common sense, easy solution. You know, I wrote a blog that we covered on this pod two and a half months ago saying that I thought mass should be public mass wearing should be policy. It should be the law. Little did I know that I was taking a left wing position. Yeah. Oops.
SPEAKER_03: Did you lose any friends over that?
SPEAKER_01: Right. Right. I know. Still talking to you. I know you guys have me on the show as the token right winger, but actually I just appear at CNN.
SPEAKER_00: Just asked me to be on the show today to explain why mass should be policy. So I just thought that was a common sense thing. You know, I'm normally very receptive to libertarian arguments, but, you know, like we talked about the boundaries of libertarianism are, you know, you only have the freedom to wave your arms until your fist hits my nose. You know, and something similar is true about when your infectious particles hit my nose. You know, there are reasonable boundaries to freedom there in the interest of other people's health. And, you know, that blog, a lot of public pronouncements about COVID have not aged very well over the last couple of months. I think that blog actually has aged pretty well by comparison. And because you just look at all the countries that have been successful at fighting COVID. I mean, Japan has 135 million people. It's an old population and they've had under a thousand deaths. South Korea, 51 million people under 300 deaths. You take a Western European nation like Czech Republic, they had a huge COVID outbreak spike just like the rest of Europe. They went all in on mass swearing and they've completely controlled the virus. It's knocked out. And so it's really crazy to me that we just can't get on the same page as a country about something as obvious and easy as mass swearing.
SPEAKER_01: And it's because we, the left wants to get Trump out of office so badly and they're so triggered by him and they hate him so much, whether that's valid or not. We'll leave aside that they want to and then he wants to say no mask. I don't understand his motivation. What do you think Trump is thinking and who's advising him that he should be anti mask?
SPEAKER_00: I think somehow it's for the right, it's become an act of defiance. And I understand that to some degree, because I do think that the lockdowns went on too long. I think with 20-20 hindsight, we would say that the lockdowns weren't necessary if we had just gone all in on a mass policy. That's what they did in Japan. Right. And so the problem with kind of the politicians in charge is that, well, backing up a second, I think the right policy is to end lockdowns but wear masks. And the problem with the politicians is half of them didn't want to end lockdowns and the other half didn't want to wear masks. And that's kind of the weird way in which it's become this political football. So Trump was trying to do this as an act of defiance.
SPEAKER_01: What was the left trying to accomplish, do you think? What would be your cynical or charitable approach to what their reaction to this and locking down so severely?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I just I think that what was the purpose of lockdowns? I think it was the the I think the initial reaction was it was based on what happened in Italy. Right. And so in Italy, we kind of had this worst case scenario where the hospital system got overwhelmed. Tremendous fatality rate from the virus. And then we started to see the same thing happening in New York. And and I think, you know, locking down briefly in New York to get a handle on the situation, I think was justified. I don't think it began with 20 20 hindsight that we needed to do it anywhere else in the country if we had instead just worn masks. Do you think the left, though, perpetrated a perpetual lockdown?
SPEAKER_01: This is the most cynical view that I've heard, and I don't think you hear this often. And that's part of why we do this podcast is to sort of explore these, you know, kind of takes that you hear on the inside, but not maybe on CNN. The cynical interpretation was they wanted to keep lockdown to crash the economy, to make Trump look bad, to get him out of the office. Do you think there's anything valid to that argument?
SPEAKER_00: I you know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I know it's certainly possible. I think that it's possible, though, that the left just kind of underweights, you know, the economic damage of lockdowns. You know, I heard a lot of arguments about from from the left that if you wanted to end lockdowns, then you care more about money than lives. And you can't put a price on a life, which is literally what we do all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Like insurance, health care, we put a price on life free. But I was never in favor of doing nothing.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I you know, I was tweeting weeks ago that we should end lockdowns, but wear masks. And so my argument would be, look at Japan, you do more for lives and the economy by having a mask policy instead of lockdowns.
SPEAKER_01: Freeburg, what's your take on Saks's take?
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't disagree. I mean, I you know, I'm not I'm not a great expert on kind of the politics. And, you know, I can kind of comment on policy, I think, in terms of what I think is reasonable and not. I certainly, you know, thought that the lockdowns were unreasonable in the extent. But then the problem was they weren't followed. So they were all for waste. So the worst of all, the worst of all outcomes.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but there wasn't a huge like until they actually went into effect, there wasn't a huge amount of debate about this. It was just like, oh, shit, we better all go into lockdown. And what happens, this is almost like the human conscious and unconscious mind. Like, you know, the conscious mind rationalizes what the unconscious already decided to do. So everyone freaked out. Everyone had a great deal of fear. We shut everything down. And then the left and the right had their own rationalization after the fact. You know what that meant? Was it good? Was it bad? Did we overreact? Did we underreact? Should we have done more? And so I feel like the narrative is told a little bit too late here, where we all kind of like have these commentaries about left and right politics after the fact. I don't think it's really meaningful, to be honest. It's just almost like, let's fill in the what happened story with our own point of view based on our tribe or whatever we sit in. So, Chamath, how do we get out of this now?
SPEAKER_01: Because the deaths are going down. No, no, we're out. We're out.
SPEAKER_03: The genie is out of the bottle. Look, the reality is there is not a single country government that can tolerate future lockdowns because I think the populations will revolt. And so we're going to have to deal with cases as they crop up and we're going to have to deal with infection rates popping up. And, you know, we'll have to deal with this bursty economic landscape. Today, Apple just announced they're closing a bunch of stores in a few states. I'm sure they'll reopen them in a few weeks. But we're going to be in this sort of start and stop mode now for the foreseeable future. But it's just not possible to ask people now to go back into any form of quarantine or shelter in place. I just don't think they'll do it. Right. And people only do lockdowns until there's some activity that they want to engage in that they think is essential. Right?
SPEAKER_00: And so you saw with the protests, if you believe that the civil rights protests are essential, you believe that you're out of lockdown. And, you know, and if you want to go to a Trump rally, you believe that's essential and you're out of lockdown. And so, you know, so everybody, you know, you had the case in Texas of the woman who wanted to open her haircut salon. And so, you know, you were never going to get good compliance with a lockdown plan. In addition to the damage and destruction it caused, it was never very effective because people weren't willing to do it. And I think the big public policy mistake here was the politicians squandering their credibility on lockdowns that were never very feasible. Instead of just going all in on masks, it would have been a lot cheaper. By the way, the other thing is we need to push mask wearing back into a public health debate.
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, Newsom yesterday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, basically said masks are now mandatory in California. The thing is you have to add fines if you don't wear them where, you know, people can be cited and fined. And then the other thing, and David, you said this earlier, is you have to be criminally culpable at some level if you go out of your way to not wear a mask and infect somebody. And there is a bunch of, you know, case law on how this can be true. And so I think that, you know, we need to solve these things because you need to have good hygiene around mask wearing and what the consequences are if you choose to not wear one. Well, you know, Shmup, it's interesting you bring that up. There have been cases of people purposely infecting people with the HIV virus and going to jail for it and being liable for it.
SPEAKER_01: So there is, I think, and I'm a lawyer. What's the difference? Coughing in somebody's face versus having sex with them when you know you're infected. What is the difference?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I don't know if you saw this viral video of the Karen, which is-
SPEAKER_01: So many Karens these days. So many Karens. And Aunt Karen just like got upset that somebody was calling her out for not wearing a mask in a cafe and she literally coughed on the person. Did you see that video? How is this person not in jail? I mean, it's- I think that was in New York, right? I think it was New York and the woman didn't know she was being filmed. But oh my lord. I mean, the great thing about the Internet right now is like if anybody basically transgresses, they are identified in about a nanosecond.
SPEAKER_03: And I mean, I saw that because on Saturday morning, she coughed on this person who was complaining about her not wearing a mask. And within 15 minutes, they had her LinkedIn, they had contacted Weill Medical Center where she worked, and then Weill put out a press release basically saying we had fired her, you know, for being a dummy well before the mask thing. And so the whole thing now just gets so adjudicated and resolved so quickly. It's incredible. We basically moved to Judge Dredd now. It's like the social media is the judge, the jury and the cops in this entire equation.
SPEAKER_01: The one that I love actually that really actually frankly I look forward to was the cyclist in Maryland.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, you cannot go after kids.
SPEAKER_01: Touching another person's child.
SPEAKER_03: And women and like attacking them for putting up, you know, Black Lives Matter posters like and then to attack these. But then again, it was the sub community on Reddit and it was amazing. It was the actual like Maryland subreddit. Who knows what's going on in the Maryland subreddit on Reddit? What could they be talking about? But they identified this guy and he was fired. He was arrested and it all happened within, you know, probably 36 hours.
SPEAKER_02: But you got you guys know in that story. There was another guy who was identified first and he was a police officer and people went after him. And he basically had his life ruined within those first 24 hours and he was the guy. Yeah, yeah. He wasn't the guy. The way they got him was the Stravia data, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like he had they found a guy on Stravia who had done that. Yeah, that's right. That's the guy was using Stevia, the app that for the bike people. And they monetized that app through subscriptions. Correct. Don't make fun of my dyslexia, Jamal. You're bullying me on my own podcast.
SPEAKER_03: You say monetize on CNBC in front of millions of people. It's unbelievable. We tried to teach you how to pronounce that word for 15 years. I know, but I say it on purpose now and I lean into it now.
SPEAKER_01: It sounds slightly pornographic or something.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he also, he also, he also, most are based. I'm going to go home and most, most are made later.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, go back to your Stevia story. What is it?
SPEAKER_03: Wait, so, so, so what happened is this guy got in trouble.
SPEAKER_02: And this is my point about the problem with the group think hive mind approach to these issues is you can end up not when you don't follow a predefined due process and you let the mob kind of rule over these moments. Bad shit can happen too. And so what happened? What happened to the cop?
SPEAKER_03: The copy, like everyone started chasing him down and like, you know, his whole life got ruined.
SPEAKER_02: Everyone was like death threats and fucking with him and all this sort of stuff. Calling his employer, calling people who know him.
SPEAKER_01: But they found his phone number, they found his address, they got turned upside down.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. But basically, like the fact that they found out that it was someone else doesn't resolve the fact that there are now hundreds of people after this guy and they don't pay attention to that. It wasn't him. And, you know, due process has a role in a civilized society where you can actually create structure and resolve these things in a proper way as opposed to letting mob mentality kind of rule. I mean, otherwise, you know, this stuff can get a pretty ugly pretty fast as we saw this being just a really, you know, pretty lightweight example. But I'm not sure I'm a huge advocate of this, like, chase the guy down and then punish him at once and cancel the cancel culture is a little bit ugly right now. You don't have all the facts and you miss stuff in a lot of these cases. Yeah, there is definitely it's great that you can find criminals so quickly.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm curious what people think. And obviously, you just don't want to miss target somebody. So there's if you do find somebody's targeted, like give the information to the authorities, but you may not want to dox them immediately and and try to ruin their lives before you actually know what's going on. A lot of companies now, Microsoft, IBM and others, Amazon, I think are saying we don't want to we're going to take a pause on facial recognition. I'm curious what your each of your thoughts are on law enforcement. And we'll get into the law enforcement discussion and race relations here in this country and what we went through. We look we have been we have been we've been arming our police force mistakenly like our military.
SPEAKER_03: And we've been doing it for decades now. And it makes no sense. There is this crazy tweet I saw today. Maybe we can find AOC tweeted out where she she found this announcement from some like long tail police department somewhere who basically got a free armored truck carrier. And, you know, they're they're they're driving it around town or whatever, pulling it out of the garage. It looks like downtown Baghdad. And you're like, I mean, they're in like Fargo, North Dakota, wherever they are. I mean, like, it's just so it makes no sense. I don't think I don't think any of us thought that we wanted to apportion our tax dollars to build a second shadow army. I think we all want an army and a navy and a Marines and an Air Force. We want, you know, aircraft carriers and F-16s and tanks and machine guns and all that stuff. But we want them with our military. And then we want cops, I think, to be extremely well trained. I mean, half the time, you know, cops are you know, you ask them to be mental health counselors. Other times you're asking them to be, you know, CPR givers. Other times you're asking them to be criminal apprehenders. The job is too complicated. They clearly can't do it. They're poorly trained. And then you arm them on top of all of that. And you have the shit show that we have today. Yeah. It's not like there is an IED waiting somewhere for them to drive over where they need metal plating on the bottom of the vehicle.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what they're dealing with every day. At a minimum, let's like, look, I'm a huge fan of ending qualified immunity.
SPEAKER_03: I think that doesn't make any sense. I think we have to stop arming our police like their military. Don't train them like the military train them like a different kind of service. And we may need to go back to first principles to figure out how to actually train them properly to spot abuse, to deal with mental health, and just to be, you know, a little bit more patient and understanding and empathetic versus trigger happy. Can I ask you a question on that? So a lot of the actions that police take when it comes to lethal action is defended by the notion that my life was under threat as a cop.
SPEAKER_02: And that sources from the fact that we have a Second Amendment in this country where a lot of people are, you know, gun carriers and are allowed to have arms. So our police force has had to respond with the fact that there are a lot of guns in this country with defensive principles and defensive mechanisms to defend themselves against the loss of life due to a gun. And that makes the United States really unique in terms of the circumstance versus if you look at the United Kingdom where they don't have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, the police aren't armed and the police behavior is significantly different. You can look at this in any country where there isn't a right to bear arms. Do we not have a fundamental problem in this country that stems from the fact that the police feel or can justify that they're always under threat of loss of life due to arms being out in the country? Yeah, the contra, I think it's a fabulous question. The contra example I would say is if you look at Switzerland where the per capita gun ownership is really high,
SPEAKER_03: Canada where per capita gun ownership is really high, what I would tell you is there's a different kind of psychological training that police people go through before they're put on the streets. And that is fundamentally different here. The job as defined to them here is different than it is in Canada or Switzerland where, you know, gun ownership levels are quite robust. And I think it all comes down to incentives. And the reality is, is that there is a, to your point, David, this amplification of this idea that everybody is armed, which I think is fundamentally mostly not true in the day to day course of like living one's life. But I think police people tend to be very amplified around that threat. And as a result, the unions have basically written contracts that protect their use of force. The law is written in a way that protects their use of force. And so all of it comes from, to your point, a defensive posture of fear. But if you actually tried to train these people differently, I think you'd have a different outcome because what I can tell you is the police in Canada do behave differently. They don't reach for their gun every second.
SPEAKER_01: It's an interest. I think there's a very interesting example. And I know we don't want to like just take one anecdotal incident and then, you know, make a big sweeping generalization with it. But if you look at the gentleman in Atlanta who was shot in the back twice, Rashid Brooks, Rashard Brooks, Rashard Brooks, this example to me is so illustrative of the problem. They spent 40 minutes talking with this individual who was absolutely not a threat. They had frisked him. They knew he was not armed. He was intoxicated. He's in a drive through of all the ways you could have dealt with the situation. And I come from a family of police officers. And I can tell you a lot of stories about cops letting people go. Obviously, white people with warnings in this situation, letting them sleep it off, taking his keys, letting him run away. You know who it is. You have his driver's license. You have his car. You have his keys. Let him run away. Under what circumstances would you feel justified shooting a person when there were so many other options? And it comes exactly, I believe, Chamath from two things you pointed out. One, they're in a very defensive position. And to the training, they're trained to use lethal force. And if you're in a situation where you feel threatened, you just shoot. That's it. And if you shoot, you shoot to the center of the body to kill the person. And in their training, they're not trained to think, how do I disarm the situation, diffuse the situation? And what are the other options? This person is obviously not a threat. And you knew the taser was fired twice. I'm not saying the person should have resisted arrest. I'm not saying the person shouldn't have aimed the taser at the person, but they should be trained to protect life and diffuse situations at all costs. Jason, like think about the incentives. They should have been trained maybe to just walk into the Wendy's, buy this guy coffee,
SPEAKER_03: and then drive him to the motel that he said that he was staying at. Yes. Or they should have been trained to just write a ticket and say, listen, here's a citation for being drunk because you did technically kind of drive and now I'm going to leave it alone. They could have done many things that they chose not to do because the incentive was to project power in that situation versus project any kind of empathy and compassion. Right. And the selection of people who go into the police department. And I come from a family of police officers and firefighters, brother, uncle, cousin, grandfather, up and down the line, Irish cops and firefighters.
SPEAKER_01: Big tradition in my family. And I can tell you that there is a contingent of people who go into the police who are power tripping or maybe didn't get wherever else they wanted to be in life. And the job of seeing people and dealing with the bad stuff that you pointed out, you know, people in domestic situations, domestic violence situations, people who are mentally ill, homeless, addiction problems, all of that, then trains these peoples to see the worst in humanity. And then they just look at their job as just this dystopian, horrible experience. And they are in that defensive posture, whereas we need to train people. And I made this tweet where we should have a new class of police officer that is more like a Jedi Knight. You know, they get paid twice as much. They have master's degree in social work or psychology. And when that call comes in for an emotionally disturbed person, a person who's intoxicated or on drugs, a domestic violence situation, you don't want to send the average B cop to that. You want to send the Jedi. No, but Jason, make it even easier. Like when you go in and get a 911 call and it's, you know, there could be it's somebody who's in sort of like mental distress or you're going to do a mental health check.
SPEAKER_03: Why don't you send a really well trained social worker? Absolutely. And the reason is...
SPEAKER_01: Why don't we have a whole, you know, a whole force of social workers that we pay $100,000 a year?
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. And that's what these police officers are making. There is an argument to not have them armed. There's an argument for them to be armed.
SPEAKER_01: But maybe they're so enlightened and trained so well. I think the training in the United States is in the low hundreds of hours. In other countries, it's thousands of hours. I mean, if a person has a gun, I think police should not get their gun until they've completed maybe two or three thousand hours on the job. In other words, they get to the second or third year. So the first year when you're a pro be why even have a gun? Why not just have them doing things without a gun? And then when you get that gun, maybe you need to have the equivalent of a master's degree. You know, maybe you need to have a level of training and we need to go to first principles like you're saying, Shammoth, and rethink this whole thing. In any startup or any problem solving, you would look at the show me the thousand calls. How did they break down? What were the outcomes? And if you look at the outcomes of dealing with mentally ill people or people who are addiction or domestic disputes, the outcomes are things that police are not trained for. That's got to be a very high percentage of these situations, let alone the no knock warrant, which makes absolutely no sense. I mean, I think I think there's there's just a lot of look, there's a lot of change coming.
SPEAKER_03: I think that there's a lot of legislation afoot at every sort of level of government. And I think the good news is that it's going to be hard for people to sit on their hands on this. I don't think it's going to be universally across the country. But I do think that, you know, people will then again, self select and want to live in places where, you know, sort of like the laws match their ideals. And this is going to be an area of tremendous reform and change. You know, what's interesting about all of this is like, if you actually go back to the Republican ideology, it's interesting to me why Republicans aren't the first ones to try to embrace rewriting, you know, the union contracts and actually decreasing unionized power. Because that's sort of like has generally been a tent hole theme of Republican ideology. But then as it gets applied to cops, I think they kind of just abdicate responsibility. So there's a lot of reasons where you could have bipartisan agreement on a bunch of these things. But again, I think we're, we're we kind of like get caught up and we refuse to see the forest from the trees and want to fix these things. I suspect that a lot of these changes will happen just because they're so bloody obvious. And depending on your ideology, you can frame the same reason for completely different motives and get to the same answer. Nobody wants this. Sax, what do you think about the union issue as our token right winger?
SPEAKER_00: I think, yeah, I think I think the police unions have too much power. All the public employee unions do. I think, you know, just like the teachers unions have thwarted school choice and education reform. I think we're seeing the police unions toward a lot of sensible reforms around the use of force. You know, our friend Bill Gurley has been tweeting a lot of great research that around police departments that are unionized, there's a lot more complaints against them. There's a lot more examples of the use of force and unwarranted use of force. And so clearly there's a connection here between police unions and the thwarting of common sense reforms. And I saw someone someone tweeted this idea that, you know, the reason why no one's taking on the police unions is because Republicans see the word police and Democrats see the word union. And they're both fans of those things. And so who's who's going to take them on?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, teachers unions is the same thing. And the political system, the political power of the unions is so entrenched that in order to get in office for in most cases, you're going to need to have the support of those unions. And if you don't, they're going to tell people explicitly not to vote for you. Yeah, I mean, well, well, look, I mean, you look at the cities that have had the biggest problems here.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, starting with Minneapolis. And these are Democrat controlled cities. These are not Republican controlled cities. And the politicians are very much, you know, in cahoots with the big union, the unions there, including the police, the teachers unions, all that. And so, you know, both parties need to be open to reform. To your point, David, there's a there's a story that came out last or last couple of days about the DA in Atlanta, who pressed charges against the two officers. But the narrative was about how the DA is being investigated for getting 140K in kickbacks from a nonprofit tied to something.
SPEAKER_03: And then he was claiming that his main opponent, who's right, because these district attorneys are politically elected officials, right, where she had basically done a side deal with the police to not to not go after, you know, use of force in return for their endorsement. And, you know, what a what a horribly messy, like complicated, gross situation, irrespective of whoever turns out to be right there. So to your point, they've become so entrenched and it's just so low level, that then, you know, what should be obvious justice basically just gets thrown away for what's expedient and convenient.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Well, you know, this is another example where, like with the mass, I felt like there were, you know, I wasn't violating conservative principles. I thought there really was a conservative principle. I think with, you know, with this example of the overuse of force by police, you go back to what Lord Acton said, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If there's no one standing up to the police unions politically, they have absolute power and that's going to lead to corruption. So I do think like Republicans should be looking into this. Now, I think part of the reason why Republicans want to defend the police is because we've also had these examples of looting and rioting and lawlessness. You know, after the civil rights protests. And I think that, again, we're kind of dividing up into sides and there's too much justification of bad behavior on both sides because of what the other side is doing. You know, and I heard people on the left justifying the looting and rioting on the grounds that, you know, it was a legitimate expression of, you know, of opposition. It was a legitimate protest. It was a legitimate expression of opposition to the police violence. And I think that that is wrong. And I think it's wrong for people on the right to defend this police, the success of use of force by police on the grounds that somehow it's justified because we need to control the lawlessness and the rioting. And, you know, I think both are wrong. And we lack a federal leadership to not make this overly political. But when Trump then tear gasses with the military protesters to go do a photo opportunity, you know, it's sending the message that he and he wants to be the law and order president.
SPEAKER_01: Now you're just charging things up instead of just going on TV and just saying something to bring people back to the concept that we're all Americans, we're all in this together and we rise and fall together. It's such an easy statement. Listen, the protesters have valid concerns. We need to work on this issue. And yes, if you see people doing any vandalism, you we have to stop them. Please make sure that doesn't happen because it it works against the very valid criticism and protests that are going on that need to go on. And the fact that the president can't say that is crazy.
SPEAKER_03: Well, what do you guys think about what he has been saying and how Twitter and Facebook have basically taken different sides of free.
SPEAKER_01: But go ahead. What Trump's been saying, yeah, should should Twitter be censoring him slash putting warnings on his posts when he's saying crazy stuff?
SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, look, I mean, it's such a slippery slope and there's too much room for interpretation. I'm just saying the obvious. But, you know, if you're a platform, you're a platform. You know, you let the things get built on top of you. Sure, you can have some some rules around what can be built. But as soon as you start saying what is true and what is not true and you become the arbiter of truth, you're no longer an agnostic platform. And I think that, you know, that that is a big, dangerous risk to take because as you guys know, something may be. And I think we saw this with the what's that Twitter account? Zero hedge. Zero hedge. Was that the name of the hedge? And then they came back because it turns out what they said wasn't necessarily as untrue as Twitter at first thought that they were saying was untrue. So, you know, it was a great example of how, you know, a point of interpretation can very quickly kind of reverse course. And you can look extremely biased in making that decision at that time. And so I think Susan Wojcicki took the Wojcicki took the position at YouTube that we're going to allow people to talk about coronavirus if what they're saying is in sync with the World Health Organization.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And by the way, the World Health Organization, I've had an issue with since well before covid, just from another life. They I won't get into it, but they've said some stuff publicly that that was just flat out fucking wrong scientifically and invalid. And it was politicized and we we kind of got to the root of the political driver behind it. So I've long held kind of disbelief in the World Health Organization as a trusted source of of scientific fact. And to Saks's previous point, you want to be able to check power.
SPEAKER_01: And if the World Health Organization is this incredibly powerful organization who got it wrong with masks and didn't even know, like David Saks is getting it right. Some venture capitalist in the Bay Area gets it right about mask and the World Health Organization gets it wrong.
SPEAKER_02: Well, he's in Mexico, but yeah, I mean, undisclosed location in Mexico.
SPEAKER_01: But OK, Saks, should they should they be putting labels and warnings on politicians when they say things that are. Consensus wrong. Yeah, I mean, call me old fashioned, but I'm very much in favor of free speech and I'm against censorship.
SPEAKER_00: And fact checking your politicians you don't like is is a is basically bias. It's soft censorship. I mean, they're being very selective in who they decide to fact check. And, you know, there's no good way to do it right. I mean, there is no truth API that they can just plug in to to fact check people. The way that you deal with with bad speech is more speech. I think it's a line from Justice Brandeis. That is the way historically that we have in this country that we've dealt with speech by people we don't like, which is you have more speech. And and I don't think censorship or warnings is the right way to go. Shammoth, what do you think, having worked at Facebook?
SPEAKER_03: OK, I think it exposes a couple of things. One is that the Twitter product is still relatively brittle. I mean, like at least Facebook has a whole suite of emoticons to say something is a crock of shit. You know, and it makes you feel bad or, you know, makes you feel angry or thumbs down or whatever. And so Twitter's reactionary feedback mechanism to its algorithms is very brittle. And so if you were going to try to algorithmically tune down the distribution of, you know, a Trump tweet, you know, you could see where you could balance thumbs up or hearts in this case with other ways of signaling that this is either wrong or hate filled or, you know, instigating. And I think like a little bit more self-policing is probably the only scalable solution. All of that said, here's what I will say. I think basically that Facebook is becoming Middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts. And, you know, Facebook is basically a product of Middle America plus kind of like countries outside the United States and, you know, Twitter is about, you know, rich coastal kind of people. And you can see that the way that the content ebbs and flows and, you know, the kind of content problems. Like just for an example, you know, what is Twitter's latest content problem? It was that Donald Trump tweeted a video from CNN that was doctored, you know, and it only showed a clip of a, you know, a black toddler running away from a white toddler. And the caption was, you know, the chyron said something about racism. It turned out to not be wrong, blah, blah, blah. What is Facebook's issue two days ago? It was that, you know, the Boogaloo movement, which is, you know, a bunch of people who believe in a militia and an impending civil war, principally used Facebook and Facebook groups to organize. And they found out that they were distributing and, you know, driving, you know, viewers and usage and content. So it just kind of tells you like, and if you break down the issues and, you know, there's a couple of people who tweet out the most popular tweets on Twitter versus the most popular content on Facebook, what you see is a left and right distribution. And so I think that the audiences are segregating themselves into using products that basically feed them what they want to hear.
SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you a question about the leadership. We you work directly with Zuckerberg for many years. And we all know Jack from Twitter, from various projects. What is Zuckerberg's politics? Is he a secret Trump supporter? Is does Peter Thiel, who's on the board and you're good friends with Peter Thiel and worked with Peter Thiel Sachs. I'm curious what you think goes on inside the brain of Mark Zuckerberg in terms of making these decisions. Is he scared that Facebook has become dependent on the right? And is that chamath that it is a right thing? And is he right or left? What is his politics? I don't think that's the right framing. I think that if you're running a big network like this, you have to remember the you know, you're one of the five or six most valuable companies in the world.
SPEAKER_03: You yourself have, you know, 50, 60, 70 billion dollars. Basically, the world is your oyster. And what you've seen over the last five or six years is that there is an increasing regulatory headwind. And if you basically play the game theory out, you know, these companies are going to get regulated and they're going to get overtaxed and they're going to get kind of slowed down at a minimum and broken up at the maximum. And so if you're running one of these companies, I think the only thing you can do is hold on. And so if you're going to hold on, there's no point in making any of these changes because it minimizes the amount of cash you can make and the amount of, you know, support you'll have. So you might as well pick a side effectively by doing nothing and waiting. And I think that's largely what all these guys have decided to do. They've essentially said, we're not going to sort of take a side here. Well, no, Twitter has taken a side.
SPEAKER_01: Twitter has.
SPEAKER_03: Because they're small enough. They can survive. They're not going to get broken up. And if you're one of the top four or five, look at the position they've taken. The position they've taken is we have no position.
SPEAKER_01: That's Facebook's position. We have no position. We're not going to police ads. No, hold on. It's also Google's. It's also Microsoft. It's also Apple's. And it's also Amazon's.
SPEAKER_03: And in fairness to Facebook, all big five tech companies have said our position is no position. And the reason is because that's the only thing they can do to keep that market cap and to hold on to the economic vibrancy of their businesses for longer. Sax, why did Twitter and Jack actually take a position? Because this cannot happen if Jack is not 100 percent supportive of it.
SPEAKER_01: He is the driver of it and the person who OKs it. And then what do you think Zuckerberg, Chumath didn't want to answer this, but I want you to try to answer it. What is Zuckerberg's relationship with Peter Thiel and his thinking on a political basis in your mind without giving up your relationship with Peter? But what is his politics and what is their relationship?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know exactly what's up. Politics are and are not even exactly. I have no idea what his politics are, not remotely. And I do remember the time when Peter supported Trump during the election and the rest of the board wanted to run him off the board. So clearly, it's not like I highly doubt Facebook is a bastion of right wing thinking. But why would Zuckerberg keep him on the board then in defiance of everybody else who hates him?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe he simply believes that supporting the Republican candidate in a presidential election is not grounds for removal from a board.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe he simply is not that intolerant. I think I mean, I'm going to actually go on a limb here and defend Zuckerberg a little bit, which is my impression of what Zuckerberg is trying to do is simply maintain Facebook as a speech platform. And, you know, if you're going to be a speech platform, you're going to be caught in the crosshairs of all these very controversial debates. And, you know, people are going to publish things that other people hate, in fact, even that the majority hates. But isn't that the type of speech that the ACLU historically defended? You know, it feels to me like there's been a rise mainly on the left in terms of intolerance for speech they don't like that they consider to be insufficiently. Yeah, you saw that with the New York Times newsroom. I think you tweeted a tweetstorm from an opinion writer there. It was around the Tom Cotton editorial, which, you know, it's not like I agreed with it, but they kind of had a, they basically fired the opinion page editor because they realized they published.
SPEAKER_03: And by the way, sorry, just to build on your point, the title, which wasn't even written by Tom Cotton, was I would say an order of magnitude worse than the article if you read the whole article. Right. But the title was really offensive, wasn't even written by them. It was written, I think, by the editor that got fired. But the article itself was kind of bad, but not nearly as bad as the title, which he did. Because Freeburg 20 years ago, when we were all as Gen Xers coming up, we were taught to defend freedom of speech as a core tenant of a vibrant democracy and that you need to be able to read unpopular opinions.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the KKK needs to be able to march down Main Street and we need to protect that ugly speech in order for everybody else to have it. And here we have an editorial which obviously none of us agree with. Is this an existential threat to America that we are now going to say freedom of speech is not a core tenant of the of the American experiment? I'm just looking for the term that was used by what's the other New York Times opinion writer.
SPEAKER_02: I forgot her name, Saks. Maybe you'll help me. But she talks about like a comfort culture. So basically, we used to pride ourselves on a culture that enabled freedom of speech. And that was that was cherished and heralded. And what is cherished and heralded now is a culture that protects people from hearing offensive and scary things that they don't want to hear. And that shift, you know, those of us who are Gen X, which I think I am, I was born in 1980 into the millennial Gen Z and beyond kind of generation has occurred. And it is fundamentally changing the nature of how we find truth and how we find, you know, coalesce around decisions as a society. And we're excluding the things that are offensive. And it's a little bit scary to think about from my point of view that, you know, we can't explore all options. We can't hear all dissenting points of view. This is certainly a very deep argument about how our society and our how our democracy operates. But it is happening. And so the point was like we are we are starting to shift towards valuing comfort over over freedom of expression. And that's that's just kind of the big the big change that's occurring. And look, we do live in a democracy. So the votes are going to be what what ultimately decides what happens here. Votes in terms of who's using Facebook versus Twitter and votes in terms of who's voting for what presidential candidate and what governor and what mayor. And so we'll see. You know, it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a sea change in how this democracy operates. Yeah, I think it's a sea change going back very far because the whole principle of the Enlightenment going back hundreds of years was stated by Voltaire,
SPEAKER_00: which is that I may disagree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. Who today is willing to do that? I mean, that was the the idea that led to political liberalization in the West. It's really a unique feature of Western democracies and liberalism. You go to anywhere else in the world. I guarantee you people aren't defending to the death your right to say things they disagree with. I don't think they're you know, I don't think Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin is defending your right to hear things that they don't want you to. So, you know, this is a very foundational part of of American and Western political liberalism, and it's being challenged now. And I think, you know, we should have more self-confidence in our ideas to worry so much about Donald Trump's tweets, which are ephemeral, be forgotten very soon, that we're willing to throw out freedom of speech. Well, yeah, I mean, this is the thing I don't understand about labeling his tweets is, you know,
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is anybody not think that this guy is hopped up on Adderall or a complete moron like or any of those things? Like we all know he's an idiot who just tweets 50 times a day and he's a scared, you know, that he's not going to win his, you know, reelection. And that he's a he's a literal reality star. So who do you mean by when you say we we all because it's a different we that I think you're saying that I think other people would be saying.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we represent. Right. I mean, that's I think the generational divide here is I don't know if it's generational.
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a lot of dimensions across which these differences of perspective occur. And I've said this for amongst our group for a long time. But there's a huge difference between a rural population and urban population in the United States in terms of what their priorities are. And I think that difference in priorities is unconscious. And that's where things really resonate that Trump says. And that really moved the needle for a lot of folks. The priority of civil rights is not as it might be in an urban center, is not a priority in a rural center and in a rural population. There's a different priority. Trump, no matter what, how he says it, the things he's saying are different than what I'm hearing from the urban population, which is where the media comes from and so on and so forth. And so Trump resonates with me. I don't care if he sounds a little bit wacky. I need wacky because it needs to be different than standard. And there's just there's a lot of divides here and a lot of dimensions across. I think that we absolutely should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
SPEAKER_03: We should never attack this very basic principle of free speech because we will never forgive ourselves if we do. But then this is why I think we come back to we should be a little bit more resilient to build products and services that allow a little bit more texture in the discussion so that you actually can have free speech flourish more in a more transparent way. And so, David, to your point, you know, how do you drown out hate speech? It's with more speech. Well, these products don't necessarily even enable that. And so I do think that we have this sort of an issue where the products and services that billions of people use to consume their information and construct a worldview today, they neither will allow things to be flagged, nor will they increment the feature surface area so that you can actually have. So then that's why I think people then get into this place where everybody feels cornered and nobody likes what's happening. And so I think that's kind of what we're in. I think that if we had a little bit more ingenuity and thinking by the folks at Twitter and Facebook, it would go a long, long way.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do think there's something I mean, the conundrum of Twitter is simultaneously it's the main way I get my news information, but I also see it as a huge source of groupthink and kind of mob mentality. And so you know, the more time you spend on Twitter, I mean, I see a lot of people saying the more unhappy they are. And so you do wonder whether it's making you more informed or whether it's just making you buy into some sort of mass psychosis. Well, it could be both. You could be becoming more informed and you could be going into a psychosis.
SPEAKER_01: But we have a lot of friends who are high profile, who like their behavior on Twitter is a separate thing than who they actually are. Right. Like they just lose their shit on Twitter. And, you know, the is really a very strange place to be sure.
SPEAKER_03: Can we talk, by the way, can we just talk about this Bolton book? I mean, what the fuck? I mean, he did ask Xi Jinping to help him win the election and he bartered by soybeans to help me win the election. I mean, this is insane.
SPEAKER_00: I think we need to, first of all, you always got to look at the source here. So I don't know how somebody could be.
SPEAKER_01: The commentator who's as far right as you could go? Who was picked by Trump himself?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he was a very weird choice for Trump because one of the main reasons why Trump won the Republican nomination is he promised no more bushes, meaning an end to these crazy... Neocon. Neocon wars of intervention. And this guy Bolton, like... He's right out of that playbook. Yeah, he's the hawk of hawks. There's not a war he doesn't want to get us into. He wanted to get us into a war with Iran. It never made any sense for Trump to hire him in the first place. But do you know why he hired him? As stated in the book?
SPEAKER_00: I've heard the explanation that he liked. I think he said something like when he sends Bolton into a room, he thinks the strength is his negotiating position because the other side thinks that the US is about to invade or something when Bolton comes into the room. And it's also Trump was like, I love hearing you talk. It's just like Fox News. That's the quote. So he literally picks people based... I mean, and he picked Ludlow, right? He picks them based on being TV personalities.
SPEAKER_01: I just think this Bolton guy is like, you know, this is crazy war hawk who also is this kind of like a weasel. And I don't know how he creates a 500 something page book out of spending 17 months in the White House. I guess he's just writing down every...
SPEAKER_00: I'm surprised it's not 5000 words. That should be like tokens Lord of the Rings trilogy.
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna put this out there. If he can produce the note that Pompeo gave him that said, Trump is so full of shit, that thing at auction, I'm telling you now... What do you each bid for it? At least $500,000. If that note actually exists and he has it, it's I mean, it's but I just think to me, first of all, it's a little ludicrous that this guy he is a bit of a weasel because like, where were you during the impeachment? A, he made an economic calculation that his book was more important than the future of the country. So first of all, you know, kind of go fuck yourself for that. But the other thing though, is that, you know, beyond his sort of like, character flaws, it's just the story after story after story. It's just kind of from the bizarre to the absurd. Like, Finland's a part of Russia, England doesn't have nuclear weapons, please buy soybeans. You are part of the nuclear powers? UK? Really? The United Kingdom has nukes? Wow, what if India gets them?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but every one of these insider tell all books always makes the, you know, always makes the president look bad. I mean,
SPEAKER_00: It's not a hard task.
SPEAKER_02: Was there anything though that was surprising to anyone? The Xi Jinping is a blockbuster.
SPEAKER_01: The Xi Jinping did catch me off guard that he was that brazen and kind of sad.
SPEAKER_03: But does it surprise you? I mean, like, like the fact that it was said, but like the motivation, the intention, the model of operating like...
SPEAKER_02: No, to your point, my expectations are so low. It's like teaching a kid to poop in the toilet for the first time. You know, as long as it doesn't poop on the floor, even if he does it in his diaper, you know, everything looks like success as long as there is just not raw feces on my hardwood.
SPEAKER_03: If he sat on the potty, it's success.
SPEAKER_01: It's success. Even if the pants weren't pulled down. If he poops his pants on the potty... Freebird, tell me about, tell me about, I just want to switch topics. Tell me about vaccines, because it seems to me that there's like a growing cohort of people, and I'm not going to put Moderna in this camp, but like, maybe they did, that were very opportunistically out there generating a ton of PR.
SPEAKER_03: But what if you had to pick a time and a timeframe, and then a manufacturing timeframe, can you just tell me what your... Give us the over under so we can bet a line on it.
SPEAKER_02: So there's gonna, I think there's going to be a staged release of vaccines that will probably, believe it or not, start in Q4 of this year. And there's been production ramp up going on in parallel to testing. So, you know, to get these vaccines produced, whether you're talking about the mRNA vaccine or you're talking about the viral vaccine like they did in China, which they actually do have in production. There's a bunch of different challenges with scaling up and ramping production, and then, you know, what's called downstream processing and filtering and packaging and all this stuff. Anyway, it's a big fucking exercise. So what's gone on is there's been a parallel effort to actually scale up production of these things before we've actually completed the testing of them to make sure that they're safe and efficacious. And as a result, and some of this came out of that first or second stimulus bill, some of it came from private funding, and then other governments are just straight up paying for it. And so there are a number of facilities that are actually ramping production right now. If they don't work, if the vaccines ultimately don't pass muster, it's just going to be a write off of a couple billion dollars. And so theoretically, we could have doses that are available for distribution to healthcare workers and frontline people in Q4 of this year is what I would kind of set the over under at. What do you think these vaccines are like flu vaccines, which is like 50-60% effective at best?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't really know the answer to that.
SPEAKER_02: I would say that these things are probably pretty effective. I would say the flu vaccine is just a high rate of mutation and also a low rate of utilization and a high rate of infection. So we're going to have a lower rate of infection, probably a more moderate rate of mutation as a result. And so we should be more in control if we get something that works with the current strains. And the way that this SARS-CoV-2, most of the vaccines are built around the seven, I think, major targets around the spike protein and different epitopes across the spike protein. And so, you know, if you see a great degree of mutation across that protein, it's likely going to be less infected, less effective as a virus, and so it'll go away. And so I think that we've got a really good shot here. What are the odds that somebody politicizes the vaccine and America doesn't get it?
SPEAKER_02: America doesn't get it? Oh, politicize 100%, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, look, we politicize fucking measles. 30% of people, kids now aren't getting vaccinated for measles, which is crazy. And now there's measles outbreaks happening in the U.S., which is just, you know, mind boggling. I think that's just happening in Marin, where you are.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, easy. I think that's just the place with the highest percentage of graduate degrees in the country.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, but I mean, it's inevitability that it gets politicized. But David, like, how does the distribution of these vaccines work?
SPEAKER_03: Meaning, like, let's just say that it's like Sanofi, for example, because I saw that the French government made a large investment, and the Germans did as well, to essentially, like, onshore a bunch of their, you know, companies who had promising vaccine candidates. And so if you assume that there's a distribution of these vaccines, let's just say the most efficacious ones in China, are they just going to dole this out to whoever's willing to buy it, or they're going to decide on a political basis how to basically give these? And then when they come to the United States, how do we know that it comes to Texas before it comes to Wyoming versus California versus New York? So I think the ones that are getting federal support, which all of them are pretty much at this point, are, you know, going to be federally mandated in terms of distribution.
SPEAKER_02: And there's probably some commercial agreement that none of us have seen in terms of like what that looks like. So Trump will send them to the swing states where he's behind, is what you're saying?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it'll probably be delegated down to Health and Human Services.
SPEAKER_02: What are the chances that there's a Trump logo on the side of the syringe?
SPEAKER_01: Here's your Trump vaccine. Enjoy. There's a Trump vaccine to save your life. OK, this is a good point for us to kind of wrap around the horn. Chamath and I think a lot of people were convinced that Trump was going to sail into office. Now everything is showing, Fox News polls, CNBC polls, Survey Monkey polls, that Trump is very far behind, especially in the swing states. What are the chances? Trump wins the election. Sacks.
SPEAKER_00: I think he's well, I think Covid's really hurt him because the sort of feather in his cap, the thing he really had going for him was the economy. That's been hurt, but it's coming back. You know, the situation could look very different six months from now. Right now, it looks pretty bleak because I do think that his reaction to the crisis was seen as very inflammatory. But I think six months from now could be a very different story. Five months. So you don't think he's going to win right now?
SPEAKER_01: But if the election were today, he would lose. But, you know, the economy, we're seeing a V-shaped recovery, which I think is surprising all of us.
SPEAKER_00: And if that holds up and we get past the civil unrest that we've had and, you know, he saw us being so inflammatory on those issues, I think that, you know, the situation could look very different in five months. You got to remember the other thing, which is Biden at some point is going to have to enter to some presidential debates. And, you know, it's known if he's going to be there is what you're saying. Cognitively.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I mean, that's the popular to talk about. But you actually think there's a cognitive issue? Yes or no? Probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah. It's uncomfortable to say for some reason. Yeah. But it's I mean, at a minimum, look, there's a problem with the way he speaks.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there's a which is indicative of a problem with the way he thinks. But, you know, like when if they're on stage for two hours in the debate, I think we're going to find out really quick. And I and I think those debates are pretty unavoidable. I don't think Biden's going to figure out a way to get out of it. So, you know, I think a lot of people think that he gets to be propped up by his staff and they can to some extent. But I think at some point, you know, we're going to take a look at Joe Biden.
SPEAKER_01: Chamath. Trump wins. Trump loses.
SPEAKER_03: Right now, I think it's sort of 75, 25 he loses. OK. I think that's going to get closer to 55, 45 as the date comes close. I think it actually comes down to two issues. Number one is who does Biden pick as a running mate? And can he lock up the swing states with that running mate? And number two, which I think is probably going to play an enormous role if if the community organizing that saw the Black Lives Matter movement get to this next level is avoiding and preventing voter suppression. You know, LeBron, I think, is about to start an enormous campaign with a lot of very well-heeled, well-known celebrities to get out the vote. But if there's a concerted effort to prevent voter suppression and get young people and people of color to the polls, it's a Biden landslide.
SPEAKER_01: Now we've gone from a Trump landslide just six months ago in all of our minds to a Biden landslide. Freeburg, where are you at? I still think Trump's going to win.
SPEAKER_02: I'd say 70 percent chance Trump wins. And I'll tell you why. I think there's still there's not going to be structural improvement between now and November for the majority of people that voted for Trump in the last election. There are going to be a large number of people in blue collar and rural areas that remain challenged with their life and feel like they're missing out. And they're missing. And this may even be true in inner city districts. But the big kind of flip vote in the rural and blue collar areas is going to say, I still need change. I need things fixed. And Trump is the agent of change. Biden, he has always been the agent of change. And I'll tell you the other thing that he's also a master of is laying blame. And so Trump is incredible at pointing a finger at some third party and saying, that's the enemy. I'm the guy who's going to go to feed him for you. And I think that's what won in the election last time. And I think it could win him the election again this time. No matter what shit happens between now and November, he will find a way to make the story about how some third party or some process or some deep state is still responsible for that outcome. That's keeping you down, Mr. Blue Collar Factory Worker. And I will be the person to vanquish that problem. Biden is the old state. He's the old guard. He's the guy from before. And we haven't changed anything in the last four years where people feel happy and secure about their lives. I think to Saks's point, if the economy was even stronger, it may hurt Trump's chances. Sure, a lot of folks might say, great, Trump's responsible. Let's give him a thumbs up. But the more people are feeling pain, the more they're looking for an agent of change. And I think Trump against Biden is still going to be that agent. That makes me the deciding either tie or swing vote. I believe Biden wins.
SPEAKER_01: I believe Trump is absolutely lost his ability to win this because he made two critical errors to Saks's very astute point. He just complete blunder on wearing masks and leadership during covid and complete blunder in terms of dealing with the social unrest, which he could have acted as a reconciliation agent. I mean, he's his own worst enemy and couldn't do those two very simple things. I think Biden wins big if he takes the following strategy, which I will call the Avenger strategy, which is it's not just about him. He gets an incredible running mate to Chumot's point. But not only that, he pre announces his cabinet Avenger style and they start hosting a la Cuomo in New York. Daily briefings where they talk about what the country needs to do with a brain trust in a roundtable with five or six people pre selected. So you're not voting for Biden, who might have cognitive issues. And Saks is correct. He could fumble under Trump's greatest strength, which is demolishing people in debates, which we ourselves all watched. We watched Hillary get absolutely beat up in those debates. And that was our I remember those nights when we were watching at your house, Chumot. And our eyes opened right up like, holy cow, Hillary's in trouble here. He's just really good at this type of maniac boxing that he does with little Mark Rubio and everybody else. But if he picks the right V.P. candidate and I want to know as we close here, who is the V.P. candidate that you think he should pick? Amy Klobuchar just bowed out and said. A woman is not enough. You need to have a black woman. So Chumot, who is the ideal running mate? Saks, who scares you the most since, you know, the GOP is going to lose this time around? Who's the scariest for you? And Freeburg, who do you think you should pick? Give it some thought. Or do you not have a consensus choice? Oh, I'll leave my statement to the end. OK, sexy poop. You know, I don't sandbag this and pick somebody you want him to pick because it helps him lose.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know the backbench of Democrat politicians well enough to say exactly. I don't have a pick. I would just say I would really like for him to pick a great crisis manager. An operator, somebody who's been there.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody who's been tested in a crisis because there's a very high chance that this V.P. pick will become the president, given Biden's age and everything going on in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And we've just seen crisis after crisis this year. I think there's going to be more shoes to drop. And this person that we don't even know yet could very easily be the president of the United States in the next two years. So I just hope he picks someone who is good at handling a crisis.
SPEAKER_01: OK, so that would mean Oprah, perhaps? God, you just picked my father. Is that really your picture? Yeah. Yeah. Oprah Winfrey.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, she would be such a would be incredible. Oh, my God. What a wild every state. Oh, she's incredible. Oprah Winfrey for the win.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you're going to pick somebody Biden Winfrey, it's got a ring, a slam dunk. I'm sorry. Better than Michelle Obama. I am dunk better than Michelle Obama. Slam dunk. I'm going to email Blinken and Evan Ryan right now. Oprah Winfrey. OK, Friedberg, you have a better candidate. Who's your choice? I don't I don't have I don't have a choice.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm not going to make a choice here, but I think the challenge he's going to face is finding a black woman who can appeal to the blue collar and rural vote in these areas where he needs to kind of win some win some folks over. And so he's going to end up in these urban districts like the Atlanta mayor or like Kamala Harris. And they're they're not going to they're not going to bring that vote. So he is in a little bit of a pickle here because Amy Klobuchar helped him bridge the rural divide. But, you know, he's got a he's got I think it's going to be a bit of a search here. I love the idea of going with Oprah because it just becomes she is such a reconciler.
SPEAKER_01: Now, it doesn't fit the execution in a crisis to Saks's desire. And I think she's built a bigger business in Trump. I mean, what do you but that is what is about to get to is I think she's so successful and she's such a great leader and so charismatic.
SPEAKER_01: She would bring in better operators than Trump and Pence ever could. I mean, look at the shit show of people who came in and out of the cabinet. It was one goofball and incompetent asshole after another. Sorry to get a little frisky here at the end, but I feel like we're at the poker game. Trump's cabinet was in an embarrassment almost universally, correct? Saks? Well, look, here's the problem with Oprah or if you want, you know, any other Hollywood celebrity, George Clooney or what have you.
SPEAKER_00: They're just they're not used to getting beat up the way that politicians in our country get beat up. You know, they're used to having people catering to them. They're used to having the star trailer and the star treatment. And, you know, they tend to have a glass jaw in politics because they've just never been put in an environment where they're just constantly assaulted. Trump, I mean, was a celebrity, but he was used to he kind of grew up in that whole New York tabloid environment and was used to punching and counterpunching. He embraced it, in fact, he was his own fake PR person. He was calling the post.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's, you know, it's that old saying about, you know, wrestling with a pig, you know, everyone gets dirty, but the pig likes it.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Trump is kind of like the pig who likes it. You know, mostly celebrities don't like having to get beat up. You know, they're used to being very popular and and that's why they tend to be, I think, tough picks politically is they don't they tend to have a glass jaw. All right. On that, I'm free. I love you guys. Love you. Let's play poker outside.
SPEAKER_01: We'll see you all next time on the All In podcast. Bye bye.
